At the time, kids who painted the dam could get in big trouble. They could be stripped of all their honors and kicked out of clubs at school. It was a big risk for the childhood friends. They swore themselves to secrecy until graduation day.

The next day, the two words that showed up overnight on the Alpine Dam were the talk of the town, Hellemann said. And just like that, a truly unique Rockford tradition was born.

Every year, typically in the spring right before graduation and sometimes in the fall in connection with homecoming, dozens of high school seniors from across the region leave their mark on the dam with another layer of paint.

For the Silly Six, painting the dam was a bold act of school spirit. The girls went to all of the basketball games that year and even rented a bus to travel to Champaign for the state championship game, which West won.

“We were sure we were going to go down to state that year, and we were sure that we were going to win. We wanted everyone to know,” she said. “But we were scared to death we would get caught. ... No one said a word until two of us were at lunch with our parents after graduation. My dad just laughed. Most people didn’t believe it was us.”

A rite of passage

The dam, built in 1942 and visible from Alpine Road, is a 600-foot concrete wall and embankments meant to divert flood waters from Keith Creek.

Reports of people painting graffiti on the dam date back to 1952. The dam became a billboard to express high school supremacy or rivalry in the 1960s and 70s. Students would paint their school’s name over a rival school’s name. Some students would paint their school name in a rival’s colors or paint derogatory nicknames for rival schools. “Guilford Guppies” was a popular slam on the new northeast-side school.

Page 2 of 4 - “There was an element of trash-talking to it,” said Grayson Holmbeck, Guilford High School Class of 1976. “You looked for where another school painted, and that’s where you’d paint. Then, they come back around and do the same thing.”

Holmbeck and some friends painted the word “lint” on the wall their senior year. It wasn’t about school spirit. It was an inside joke. It didn’t matter if other people didn’t get it, he said. They still had fun.

The fun of painting the dam back in the 50s, 60s and 70s was the stealthy manner in which it was done. Always late at night. Always on the down-low. Always a little worried that you’d get caught.

“You’re being kind of naughty but kind of just having fun at the same time,” Holmbeck said.

There was a whole system to watching the dam and figuring out when to paint, explained Jodi Dierks, Rockford Lutheran Class of 1987.

“You don’t want to be first because someone will come and paint over you, so you had to be sneaky and try to find out when other schools were going to do it,” Dierks said. “You’d have spotters that night, too, to be on lookout.”

Painting the dam is one of Dierks’ favorite high school memories.

“It’s a rite of passage,” she said. “My class was about 40 people. We were so close, and many of us still are today. Painting the dam — that was it. It meant you graduated. ... It was a last big hurrah before we went our different ways.”

Paint your classmates

A complaint to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in 2003 threatened to end the tradition. Some students failed to clean up after themselves, leaving large amounts of garbage and paint along the banks of the dam.

By this time, things had changed. The Rockford Park District turned “Paint the Dam” into a sanctioned activity with permits, fees and rules. Rules include disposing of empty paint cans and painting during park hours as opposed to midnight or 2 a.m.

The district contemplated moving Paint the Dam to another location after the EPA complaint but never did. They never shut it down either.

Auburn, Guilford and Belvidere high schools painted the dam last fall. Jefferson High School, East High School and Christian Life did it this spring. Not to mention the dozens of others who paint the dam without permission.

Page 3 of 4 - As the adviser for East High School’s Class of 2014, Brittany Glidden — a 1998 graduate of Jefferson — was able to experience painting the dam from a whole new perspective this year — far away from the flying paint, taking photos of her students.

“It’s very cool for them,” Glidden said. “They look forward to it all year. When they finally get to do it, it means they’re almost done (with high school.)”

Today’s students spend less time painting their school name on the dam wall or coming up with a clever insult for a rival school. They mainly paint each other and have paint fights. Most students leave something on the wall like a handprint or a name.

That’s what East seniors Nate Aden and Alicia Smith did last month. Two weeks later, their names were painted over already.

“It’s a good way to end the school year,” Aden said. “You can’t take anything down there with you. No phones. No wallets. I even took my car key off my key chain and left the rest in the car. ... You get paint all over you, and paint gets everywhere. I went around painting the number 14 on everyone. ... It’s a pretty fun tradition. It was fun to finally do it after hearing about it all these years.”

The school spirit aspect of “Paint the Dam” may have started as something that graduating seniors did in the middle of the night without any official permission, but things have changed.

The Alpine Dam at Aldeen Park may look like a free-for-all with its jumbled splashes of colors and words on top of several inches of paint, but it’s not. Not anymore, and not for a long time.

The Rockford Park District, which owns Aldeen Park where the dam is located, has long said that painting the dam is allowed, but groups and individuals should not paint the dam in the middle of the night and they should get a permit in advance.

This goes for anyone — schools, church groups, fishing clubs, artists. It’s a safety issue. It’s a liability issue. It’s a way to ensure that someone can be held accountable for damage, and that two groups don’t show up to paint at the same time.

To keep the tradition alive, several schools have been following these rules in recent years and switched Paint the Dam from a nighttime activity to a daytime one. Jefferson High School, East High School and Christian Life got permits this spring. Auburn, Guilford and Belvidere high schools got them in the fall.

Page 4 of 4 - The permit costs $200 for park district residents, $260 for non-residents. Part of the fee — $100 for residents, $140 for non-residents — is a refundable deposit that’s returned to painters if they clean up after themselves and follow the rules such as keeping the paint off the grass and trees and other areas of the park besides the dam, no profanity or graphic images and no oil-based paints.